


Berries, Unripe

by docnoctem



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: Casual misogyny, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, a few UK-specific homophobic slurs, aka all that i know how to write?, emotional immaturity and stu dodging feelings that are inconvenient to him, short but possibly troubling references to murdoc's childhood abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-09-25 10:56:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17120057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/docnoctem/pseuds/docnoctem
Summary: “So—poured my tender guts out t’you then, right. Refresh my memory, how’d that go?” Reflecting on an honest moment through the lens of a dishonest man.





	Berries, Unripe

**Author's Note:**

> An even less productive than usual take on the Strawberry Incident™, written per anonymous request! More details in the end note, but if you're here anon, I hope you enjoy!

The warm colors of early evening light reflected through a tall glass bong, swirls of orange twisting up the long neck and disappearing against the captured sunset, have become so familiar now that they’re no longer impressive. The colors Murdoc’s sallow skin and perpetually black attire absorb are less impressive still, but there’s something comfortably distancing about how much his image resists change. The two of them sharing the single piece of paraphernalia on his bedroom floor might’ve bordered on intimate years ago, but it's grown rather routine now—Stu appreciates that it’s easier when it doesn’t feel remarkable.

“Good heft to this,” Murdoc comments idly, testing the weight of the glass bong in his hand, when all at once his eyes become deviously alight with an opportunity to flatter himself. “Y'know, an old band of mine once opened for this group of massive craggy-faced punkers back in the day, when I was in my twenties. Shit vocals, shit guitar, no rhythm, but loads of birds followin’ ‘em—they’d just gotten signed major, got a fat cash advance, and everyone was saying they’d be the next bloody Clash.” Murdoc rolls his eyes to punctuate, and the curl of his mouth holds a threat of spitting there on the floor. “Looked a lot mankier than Mick Jones, I’ll tell you that…”

Murdoc plugs the bowl in and brings his lighter to it, the flame coloring the last remaining edges in the small cluster with reddish light before crumbling to black. He lets the small fire flick out again and breathes in the rising smoke. The pinch of herb was the last of Murdoc’s offering, but Stu’d recently picked up an expensive strain from a skinny, wet-looking bloke just a mile south from the Spirit House. Thinning but pungent smoke filters out from between his teeth as he clenches his jaw and hands Stuart the tall glass pipe; the other takes it from him and sets it aside, one long arm sweeping under his bed for the tartan bumbag he’d worn to make the purchase.

“Called something intolerable like ‘Critical Rot’ or some other punk-by-numbers bollocks. So we’ve just opened for them down at the Withered Hand, yeah? I’ve sung my heart out, sweat glistening, standing tall—” Stuart snorts at that, “—looking good enough to eat, and the crowd was starving for it, mate. Absolutely ravenous. I get backstage, ready to enjoy the powdered spoils before scouting some talent from the audience when their manager pulls me into the frontman’s dressing room. Gorgeous,  _powerful_  amazon of a woman, easily two heads higher. Would’ve tied a hammock to her thighs and taken holiday there.” Stu would offer up more admiration at that but his searching hand’s already unearthed a bootleg VHS tape near-illegibly labelled  _Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!_  and a torn booklet from the  _OK Computer_ CD tray before finally snagging on the bag’s buckled strap, and he’s sure this story is only partially true at best. “Next thing you know, she’s getting comfortable on the green ‘n white goodie table, I’m on my knees looking at rates for summer homes in Lickar Moor, and before I’ve even gotten the first twingeof lockjaw this cro-magnon oaf is smashing me over the head with a bong. Thick, thick glass one, just like this.”

Stuart registers that something about this memory rings very wrong. His face must go a questioning sort of blank while struggling to connect the dots, because Murdoc incorrectly clocks his reaction and waves his hand dismissively.

“The tosser was faced, I mean,  _really_  faced—thought I was some fan who’d broken into his room or something, didn’t recognize Murdoc’s Burning Sensations had just set his flock out there on fire for him. All his shoddy little Anti- _Any_ where League had to do was strut out, squawk a bit and stoke my flames. Ingrate… think she might’ve also been his fiancé or something, I don’t remember the details. S’not important.”

Stu stays paused with the tartan bag in his lap, his fingers fiddling with the zipper while he half-listens to the explanation. The fog of his mind is just thin enough to see that wrongly-structured image overlaid against a different one his memory’s drawn up. He’s a shade too far past sober to withhold from working through the lie aloud.

“That’s not right, it was—it was your dad that did it.” Murdoc tenses at the mention of Sebastian, a displeased confusion on his face. “Your brother had hidden his stash on your side of the room. Your dad nearly brained you with it, said you’d not got anythin’ but foul air in there anyway… but the stem caught on your scalp and ripped a bit of the skin up. The base didn’t crack, though, so you were glad for that. You reckoned your brother would have knocked you ‘round too if it had.”

Murdoc’s shoulders are concrete stiff, eying the other as if he were stained in blood from some betrayal at Stuart’s hand, and the severity of it seems like a bit much. It dawns on Stu slowly—slower than it might’ve without the hazy hemp-smelling fog—that this was just one of the stories Murdoc shared on a dangerously intoxicated tour stop, the edges of the memory spilling and sloshing over into a dozen more woes from his years in Stoke. Without wanting to he thinks of the first time Hannibal broke Murdoc’s nose at eight, splints of fractured bone sharp in the teenage hands learning to lockpick during the winter nights spent barred outside his own home, his frozen breath swirling in the exhaust he was left to breathe twelve years later from the burly blokes who jumped him after hearing he was 'a shirt-lifter' in the pub toilets. Pieces start to line up in the clear center of Stuart’s mind, and he’d just as soon scatter them back to the dimmer edges.

“How d’you know about that?” Murdoc asks at length, his hackles still up.

Stu decides the truth is as good as anything else his fuzzy brain’s capable of coming up with in this state—keeping it simple will get it over with sooner. “Because you told me.”

“…Did I?”

“Why would I know if you didn’t?”

Murdoc’s hostility seems to melt into genuine confusion. “When?”

“I don’t know, eight years ago? Maybe nine? It was on that second leg of the Demon Days tour, I think. You were pretty much mainlining speed with a gin-and-gin chaser at the time, not surprised you don’t remember.”

Murdoc makes a vague noise of recollection at his non-recollection, then paints a look of faux-accusation on his face.

“So you thought you’d needle away at my privacy while my mind was off-duty? You think that’s clever?”

“As if. I know more and wish I retained less from your whiny gob. You were trying to bribe me in spliffs and strawberries for bein’ such an ace listener to your sod stories.”

“ _Sob_  stories,” he corrects.

“From you? I know what I said,” Stu dodges a kick to his shin for that, and can’t resist adding “though you  _were_  sobbing, mind.”

Murdoc scowls for half a beat and then cackles mirthlessly, disbelief clear on his face.

“Lie better, prat. Y’know I’m not you, right? A girl can dream, but…” Murdoc trails off, airily flitting his hand to and fro.

Stu picks up the scowl Murdoc dropped, tone turning prickly and defensive; an amateur move in present company. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t go teary-nosed and runny-eyed when I can’t have my way with five groupies instead of four, or when there’s no honeyed fig left in the assorted jams.”

Stuart’s mouth curves downward in a comically concave line. “I just don’t like the raspberry swirl.” Murdoc’s whole countenance crinkles with silent laughter.

“Why, you turning up for tea at the Choirgirl Hotel? She’s out of your purview, ponce.” Stu’s skin goes hot to match the kneejerk-boiling in his veins.

“Fuck off, you’re not flipping this on me. If I’ve done it I’ve done it with a purpose, alright? It’s called making my expectations known, and funny thing,  _then I get them_ —s’a different park.” Stu tilts his chin up like his soft upper lip is some bizarre proof of his cunning. “You’re the boozy old sop making a pitiful, weeping fuss over somethin’ that can’t be changed thirty years on. Tell me, which one’s a sorrier sight t’you?”

He can see bulging movement under Murdoc’s lips, and knows he’s tracing his tongue against his teeth to keep from snapping his jaws at him like a scrappy junkyard dog. If he had intended to bite back, he seems to think better of it and instead silently watches Stuart unzip his tartan satchel to fish the contents out, waiting for the taller to pack another bowl.

Resting it in the center of his comparatively enormous hand, Stu examines his latest treat. The small plastic bag is marked with a cheesy, hypnotically-swirling sticker and the words Xanadu Dry. The printing of the label is glossy and stiff under his touch, and the weighted ounce of weed feels chunky and much denser than Murdoc’s withered stems had been. He thumbs a small clump out and then another, unable to fit two fingers in the bag at once, and begins to unceremoniously smash them down into the bowl still slotted in the bong’s plug. He can hear Murdoc’s sharpened nails drumming without rhythm against the floor as he prepares, and he knows him well enough to pick up the buzz of uneasy energy.

“Anything else I should know I’ve disclosed against my will?” The question is more unnerved than Murdoc’s derisive tone would indicate. Stu pulls a disposable lighter out of his bag to reap the rewards of his handiwork, but soon finds it’s nearly empty of fluid and offers nothing more than a short sputtering spark.

More fragmented admissions begin to surface in his brain, abstract shapes built from words soaked in liquor and left to dry under the hot stage lights—a dollish costume smelling of salt and cheap spirits, a hunger biting in him with teeth like a rotary saw, an older woman in a cream-white apron—and something acrid and cowardly pools in him, surging up around the edges of his sympathies to drown them all the same. He hates that tightness in his chest but hates the nauseous, petulant rejection of it in his gut even more. He chooses to place the blame for his selfish priorities onto the addiction to convenience his own life’s inconveniences have dealt him: a lot of little bottles full of a lot of little pills assure that Stu’s not one to freely withstand pain he does not have to. In truth, after all he’s suffered for poor steering under the captain’s unsteady hands he doesn’t owe Murdoc his pity, but with a fleeting glimpse at that sunken sympathy Stuart wonders if it’s nice to be the sort of person who doesn’t anchor down the things a broken man is owed.

Murdoc’s holding up his metal-cased lighter but making no effort to reach into Stuart’s range with it, a slight taunt to the waving gesture and the tilt of his mouth, and Stu’s swallowing down the conversation they won’t be having—a choice he's elected himself qualified to make for both of them. 

He thinks it’s unfathomable, the cruelty in the secrets Murdoc carries. He thinks it’s unfair to burden him with carrying them too.

Smoothing his expression into something neutral, Stuart replies, “Not much, just confessed your love for me.”

For the briefest moment, Murdoc looks genuinely frozen, the movement of his hand pausing in air and his features going as still as Stu’s ever seen them. He sizes Stu up and surely knows he’s lying, but there’s something curiously distrustful in his look.

“Is that so?” He asks, voice even.

“Lips quiverin’, big fat tears dripping off your chin. Your eyes looked like wet radishes,” Stu recounts casually, flicking his dying lighter in vain. Murdoc continues to study him, frown threatening to tug his face down before it twitches into an unconvinced grin. Clearing his throat, he schools his expression to be measured as well.

“So—poured my tender guts out t’you then, right. Refresh my memory, how’d that go?” Repressing a small smile of his own, Stuart pulls as meaningful of a face as he can muster.

“You grabbed at my collar like one of those black ‘n white ladies,” Stu’s bony hand creeps up his chest to illustrate, “and you told me you couldn’t stand it anymore, watchin’ me light the stage like a God. A right banging, muscular God—like a God of music, or a God of being fit, or somethin’. Just a really brill God.”

“Exact words, I take it?”

“More or less.”

Murdoc hums something noncommittal while he makes a doubtful show of examining Stuart’s wiry arms, the knobby protrusions of his elbows looking like hard plastic ball-joints.

Stu sounds far above him as he continues, “Said it was just eating away at you, how bad you wanted me. Wanted to make me part of you.”

He’s never seen Murdoc look more disbelieving, but there’s a reluctant amusement creeping beneath it.

“Felt like all the bits of you stacked up still didn't make a full sum, but you could carry on acting like you were whole as anything until we met—that’s what you said. And the first moment I touched a hand to you, I took part of you away with me when I brought it back.” He doesn’t know if this is still funny anymore, but the way Murdoc’s watching him drags his voice lower, coarser. “You told me I’ve put a hole in you and nothing’s been big enough to fill it.”

Murdoc’s sneer seems to split his face all the way around to the back of his skull. “On account of how _goddamn special_  you are?”

Stu darts his tongue out briefly, wetting the dead skin of his lips with the gesture and leaving the edges gummy. Every bit of his mouth feels sticky and unappealing. Maintaining eye contact with Murdoc, he pulls his bottom lip under a row of incomplete teeth, the middle looking swollen as it squashes into the wide space of his front gap, and lets them slowly drag over the skin as he releases it. Bits of the peeling white residue catch on his canines, and he can imagine what a grossly unsexy picture that makes. Still, he sees the way Murdoc follows the movement and how his eyelids threaten to flutter, and he questions—not for the first time—if feeding whatever lives between them is only starving the men on either side of it more.

Stu’s tone goes deathly serious as he replies, “On account of how hung I am.”

The two share a breathless stare for a moment longer before Murdoc roars with laughter, falling back and onto his side while Stu hides his face behind his large hands to try and regain some composure.

Murdoc’s still grinning ear to ear when he looks up at him again and his eyes are red from both the headrush and the sting of gleeful tears, and it stirs something in Stu’s stomach that feels a bit more pleasantly sick. He waits for his own laughter to get lost in that feeling before he speaks up again.

“I'm kidding, you didn’t even know it was me,” Stu starts, “you only told the bong story because you were smoking that rubbish herb you always get. Just whined about how hard it is being famous, so lonely at the top, woe is Murdoc the Messiah. S’nothing I haven’t heard before after a couple birthday shots.” Stu lies through his teeth. He makes sure his smile seems more wry than pitying before tacking on, “You did tell me I was a good listener though, ‘not like the other girls.’ Cheers for that, I suppose.”

Murdoc steadies himself and considers the other. He keeps a reading eye on Stu’s suspiciously nonchalant expression as he reaches around his torso to take a swig from Stu’s tepid cider; his mouth twists in disapproval as he pulls back to scour for a name on the garish red and gold can.

“Why’ve you got this… what is this? Tastes complete shite.”

“Then don’t drink it, prick. They don’t carry Bulmers here, what’m I meant to get?”

“Didn’t know they carried cherry piss either but you’ve managed to find it nicely tinned, apparently.”

Stu readily takes the can as he passes it back and drains the remainder, keeping his lips almost completely flat at the truly unappealing flavor out of spite. He crunches the shape of the empty tin together in his oversized but undercoordinated grip, wondering if the needless action looked as gruff as it felt, but he’s not getting enough reaction to know; there were times when Murdoc’s face told too loud of a story in too many parts, and others where it struck him as very familiar with the stone in the storm, unmovable against passing rains. He isn't sure which is the better option to be stuck with, but he reckons it depends on which one's less of a disruption to his wants in the moment.

Murdoc traces a nail over his heel in an oddly pensive moment then looks askance, and with a loud clearing of his throat asks “…So you were kidding about the crying, right?”

Stu’s smile stretches.

“Stuart.  _You were kidding_ , right?”

His smile turns wicked.

“You little fuck—”

Stu buries his laughter in the mouth of the bong, the heady scent of Murdoc’s cheap weed still lingering in the chamber, but when he moves to smoke it out he’s reminded of his spent lighter’s failure. He’s barely begun to lift his head when Murdoc’s metal lighter comes dangling into his vision, held so close it makes his eyes cross. He moves to grab it but Murdoc quickly pulls it tight to his palm and curls his fist around it, index finger extended straight ahead to make his point clear.

“I give you yours and you’re never to speak of the  _alleged_  tears you  _thought_  you saw again. Are we square?”

Long legs crossing over into a pretzel shape, Stuart sets the paraphernalia down protectively behind the bend of his knees, cradled dangerously close to his groin.

“Not the first time you’ve made that bribe, now is it? And here I thought I wasn’t like the other girls.” Stu reminds him, his playful grin showing more gap than teeth.

Murdoc doesn’t seem to appreciate his dentally-deficient charms, his eyes trained on the shape and placement of the bong. His lids drop and lips quirk inversely, and before Stu can repeat his winning quip to assure he’s heard it, he’s on his knees pressing the lighter into Stuart’s hand.

Murdoc leans over his folded legs with an arm braced on either side, the drop of his head suggestive and, to Stu’s dawning mortification, familiar. His downturned face is nearing the lip of the bong protruding straight up from Stu’s crotch as he mutters “You’re a lot like one of them, actually—she just suits the latex more.”

Stu’s hand shoots to his forehead before he can make contact and half-heartedly pushes him away from his lap, shifting his hips further back but still grinning despite himself. “Freak.”

Ducking under his arm’s lanky barrier, Murdoc practically presses the crown of his head into Stu’s sternum and shifts his pose to give his back a more pronounced arch, and Stu huffs a soft laugh at how unsubtle it is. Murdoc’s hands creep up from his sides to grip around the glass tube too comfortably. “You’ve just told me I cried in front of you and there was no flogging involved—fuck’s sake Stu, find a bloody heart. Let me have the hit.”

Murdoc lowers his head and then tilts it to make sidelong eye contact with him, his bottom lip caught on the bong’s opening with the edge dragging it just slightly down. Stu swallows hard.

“Can still admit you’re a liar if you really don’t want me to.”

“I’m not a liar, tart,” Stu murmurs, his hand coming up to grasp at the nape of his neck anyway. “My mum just raised a gentleman.” Murdoc leers up at him and reaches back to curl Stu’s fingers tighter in his hair.

“You, gentle? With those mitts of yours? Must be bedding them brawny these days,” he teases, and Stu pulls at the hair in his grip warningly. With a pleased sound, Murdoc lines his mouth up fully with the mouth of the bong and says “Give me a light.”

Stuart can feel how warm and slick with sweat the metal lighter’s become in his hand. With a fleeting glimpse away from Murdoc’s head toward the door—closed, he knows, locked, he hopes—he flips the casing open and flicks the small flame to life, bringing it to the packed bowl.

The shallow water in the base bubbles quietly, and soon fresh plumes of smoke begin to billow up the torturously long neck of the bong. Murdoc seems to be making as little effort as possible to hurry the process, his left thumb rubbing against the glass while he waits to drink down a proper lungful with uncharacteristic patience. Stu’s hand starts to instinctively twist the hair at the base of his skull. Murdoc lets out something between a sigh and a hum, and by appearances just continues to swallow down the pull of smoke beyond any reasonable measure of his lung capacity. Stu dips his head to the side to see how Murdoc’s body twitches to keep still as he carefully filters the smoke back out of his nose again, eyes shut in obscene contentment until one cracks open to catch his, the skin around it creasing in amusement.

“You’re unbelievable…” he mutters under his breath. Stuart untangles his fingers from Murdoc’s hair to get a firm hold on the back of his neck, pulling at him like a cat being carried by the scruff.

After one last gulp Murdoc lifts off the mouth of the bong with a quiet keening noise in the back of his throat, passageway filled with smoke he won’t let settle into his lungs, and he stretches upward to hover beneath Stuart’s lips. He keeps his grip on the bong with one hand while the other crawls and caresses reverently over Stu’s inner thigh. Murdoc catches his gaze and holds it, and with the smallest tug of a smirk, flattens his palm low on the neck of the bong and slowly drags it all the way up the tube before sliding down again, his fingers curling over the rounded base to cup the swell of it. It’s so blatant that it should be outrageous, but Stu can feel the room’s warmth rising in the air between them and holds down a shiver of both anticipation and alarm. He knows it’ll only serve to irritate Murdoc as it always does, but he can’t stop himself from turning away from his heated stare and instead glancing cautiously toward the doorway again, very aware of the feeling of Murdoc’s nails on his thigh digging fractionally deeper. When he finds his eyes again, Stu pulls his relaxed posture up and forward, his gangly shoulders curving to box Murdoc’s smaller frame in. The downward tilt of his head forces the other man to crane his neck further to match, and he sees how the challenge in Murdoc’s look glazes over the more towering Stu becomes above him.

More and more tendrils of sweet smoke are escaping with every second they stay disconnected, and after a thick-sounding swallow Stu finds a bold voice in his chest near enough to his own to murmur, “S’a choice blend. Don’t waste it.”

Murdoc smirks, his lips parting just a hair’s width more, and he tilts his head gingerly to the side before suddenly blowing all of the smoke directly into his face in one forceful breath. Stu sputters and scrubs a hand over his eyes while the other shoves furiously against Murdoc’s ribs, knocking the smaller flat on his back, the impact almost winding him as he cackles immaturely.

“Sorry, not such a good listener, me.”

“You’re a wanker is what you are,” Stu scowls, jerking one leg up and practically skinning his elbow with the force he puts into propping it up there, “and you’re well ugly when you cry.”

“That supposed to mean anything to me? Been ugly since birth,” Murdoc shrugs, his eyes falling to where the bong’s been knocked askew by his aggressively casual posturing into the valley of his groin, rigid and obvious. His face stretches into a leer. “But you still let me have a taste, didn’t you?”

Stuart resists the pull to check the door one more time, dropping his leg back down uncomfortably and knocking the bong fully over in the process. The small pool of sullied water sloshes in the base, blocked from spilling entirely up the neck by the splash guard. Stu fumbles to set it upright and far from the vicinity of his groin again while Murdoc snorts at the clumsy slapstick of it all. He moves onto his knees to better reach the space beside the other’s overlong legs.

“Of your Xanadu, I mean.” Murdoc winks obnoxiously at him, one finger tapping against the discarded bag and clearly not meaning it. “Suppose I didn’t leave it quite so dry, though.”

Stu’s tone is exhausted with Murdoc already. “Should hope not for your sake, you’d only be making it that much worse." He pauses. "Guess I can’t forget who I’m talking to here. Maybe you want it worse.”

“I must if I’m propositioning you,” Stu makes to smack him but misses when Murdoc angles his hips away. “Not with the jeans on, it blocks the stinging. The Xanadu’s alright, by-the-by. Wouldn’t exactly call a garden of it ‘bright with sinuous rills’ but, ah, s’not like I can taste floral much anymore.”

Stu blinks, the only image in his head shown through gaussian filters and 80’s neons. “…Is that from the film?”

“S’from the poem, twit. Sorry, should know my audience by now. Have you ever read a poem? They’re sort of like songs but somehow they’re less bloody banal than yours. Bit less gay, too.”

Stu scoffs. “What tweedy professor’d you let floss with your stockings while he gave you that line? You’ll have to point him out next time we’re touring through Cambridge—not _Cambridge_ -Cambridge, ‘course. You’d bag a bloke nearer to Homerton, I’m guessing.”

Murdoc looks mockingly offended before shrugging and sitting back on his heels. His knees slide outward slowly until he’s spread as far as the denim and his less than stellar joint support will allow.

“Fancy finding a cavern measureless to man?” He's clearly pleased with himself for that.

Stu doesn’t need to get the reference to get Murdoc’s meaning; it helps that his meaning rarely changes. “S’been a lifetime since your cavern was measureless to man.”

“Cheeky, cheeky.” Murdoc’s grin widens, and it’s hungry and grim-humored enough for Stu to comfortably pack their almost-conversation back into the furthest recesses of his mind. The telling of it all does nothing for him, and it does nothing of real value for Murdoc either; it doesn’t change the story to share it, not in a way that counts. And it isn’t really fair for him to make that call and pretend it matters one bit what hardship he’s sparing Murdoc when he’s fully awake to his lifelong pattern of choosing what’s easiest for himself, but his fingers still struggle to tie a simple overhand knot and his medicine cabinet is full of grievously-labeled eye droppers and the smell of seawater makes his stomach twist with a dread he can’t put words to, and there's not a lot about them that seems  _fair_  to Stuart.

Stretching one leg out to less than full length, his reach already sprawling in the short distance from point A to point Murdoc, he settles a titanic-sized trainer into Murdoc’s open groin and watches how readily he folds at the contact. Murdoc’s expression begs without saying a word, and it’d be better for Stu if he didn’t have to think about the _why_. It’d be better if he didn’t have to wonder if he’s helped keep a wound open in him—a hole, he snidely thinks, a hole he hadn’t really put there but he was handing Murdoc the tools to continue hollowing out again. He’s always known Murdoc to be unwell and long ago made peace with what he is in order to have the life he now has, but with the years and the ill-will and the short mistakes of honesty behind them, he almost resents Murdoc for being unwell in ways that Stu—despite everything Murdoc's choices have done to him—is still human enough to feel regret for. Murdoc has no right to take that from him too. There’s nothing gratifying he can do with that feeling so he’s only able to tuck it away again, bury it behind a lousy American cider and a few more hits of a strain he doesn’t understand the name of, and put a little more weight into the press of his foot.

“Looking starved for it there, mate. Absolutely ravenous,” Stu echoes. “S'funny, actually... I’m feeling a bit peckish from the smoke myself. Think I could go for a nice spot of jam and brown bread first.” His foot retreats and Murdoc almost buckles, frowning at the loss.

“Don’t bother, you’ve eaten all your fucking honeyed fig already.” Murdoc dismisses.

“M’not in the mood for fig.”

Stu finds his legs beneath him despite his protests and Murdoc’s frown borders on a pout. He stops just in front of Murdoc, trainers so flat and long they nearly span Murdoc’s thighs and leave his ankles framed by his spread knees, and he knows Murdoc can feel his body’s heat by the tremor that dances up his torso momentarily; he knows Murdoc will wait up, just like this. He hasn't yet decided if he'll come back. The line of his mouth quirks at the edge.

“Got a craving for strawberry.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a kind anon over on Tumblr, based on the following prompt: _"Same anon here, the only thing similar to a prompt I can think about is that time when murdoc "mistook" Stu for a groupie and pulled him over to the winnie to have a "talk", Id love to see what you'd make of it with your writing!"_ I... ended up taking a lot of liberties with it, haha. Anon, I really hope you still enjoyed this bitter suggestive mess despite my total inability to follow the instructions I myself asked you to give. Thank you for reading!
> 
> Come be a pal on tothedarkdarkseas.tumblr.com!


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